Searching online on my phone this morning, I stumbled upon an advertisement for ATP Flight School. The video followed two ATP flight instructors, barely out of diapers by the look of things, flown at company expense to the Cessna factory in Witchita to take delivery of a spanking-new Cessna 172-gleaming paint, G1000 glass cockpit, comfy seats, and that wholly-unfamilar-to-the-rest-of-us, new-airplane smell. Excitement grew within me just watching this ad. Still, a sadness overcame me as this newborn Skyhawk reluctantly accepted her fate as a trainer, in time a vibrant life beaten to death at the hands of the recalcitrant student.

While it makes my heart soar that yet another Skyhawk now has taken flight, as an experienced flight instructor myself, I have a slightly different perspective on this new acquisition. When I was teaching twenty years ago, all of the airplanes on the flight line were older, leased Skyhawks, all of which were airworthy, of course, but several, if only by the broadest definition of the word. Regularly trusting my life to such seasoned aircraft made me vigilant.

Certainly, ATP is promoting the image of itself as a responsible, appealing flight school flying modern, capable airplanes with state-of-the-art equipment, and there is everything right about this picture. ATP is an excellent flight school. I wish I’d had such equipment not only during my training, but also as a teacher.

A certain young man, let’s call him Dave, came to my school one day years ago with a notion of learning to fly. He was assigned to me to teach him. As a boy, Dave had set a goal for himself to become both retired and a millionaire by age twenty-five. For various reasons he did not articulate to me, something, I suspect, to do with the weak market, perhaps also bad luck, as well as poor business decisions, he missed this goal, achieving both retirement and millionaire status in his thirties instead. With no diversions, no natural interests, little else to motivate him to arise in the morning, with nothing to occupy his youthful retirement, his friends urged him to find a hobby. At least one among these caring souls suggested aviation.

No disrespect meant, but by all metrics, at my disposal anyway, Dave was a man clearly unfamiliar with physical activity. He was polite, reserved in manner, even passive, one might characterize him, and quietly-friendly, but a man heavy, awkward in motion and subtle detail. Still, the mere suggestion of an activity to occupy his retirement other than boredom excited Dave so thoroughly that when he first telephoned the school, he insisted the dispatcher schedule lessons-with both me and the airplane-six months out. Thus, we began our training. It was slow and awkward, but we kept at it.

Not long into his training, out in the practice area one day high over Culpepper Airport, I asked Dave to review a power-off stall. With some help, he did a clearing turn to the left, then one to the right. Straight and level once again, Dave applied carburetor heat, then eased back the throttle, but only so far. When I urged him to continue throttling back, I was informed that the throttle would not close. I took over. Sure enough, the tachometer would not budge below 2000 rpm. The throttle was jammed; I could increase rpm, but not retard it.

I studied the problem to verify Dave’s complaint and effect repair, if possible, finally declaring to him that the lesson was over, immediately turning us toward the Washington, D.C. SFRA, and HEF within. Since it is physically impossible in the known universe to land a Skyhawk at 2000 rpm, I faced the trip back to the field trying to engineer something approaching a safe landing in this crippled airplane.

Cleared by Potomac Approach into the SFRA, and with my squawk dialed in, I successfully experimented using increasing pitch to lower my airspeed so that I could deploy my flaps without risking structural damage. Applying carburetor heat, I could knock off 100 rpm, and the stuck throttle gave up another 100 rpm if I pulled hard and held it fast, although it did occur to me not to pull too hard for fear of breaking it off, but 1800 rpm still is too much power for the task. Upon contact with Manassas tower, my controller on duty that day, as it happened, is a man who can be a bit difficult at times, so in hindsight I could have declared “Pan-pan” just to keep him off my back during my busy go-around. However, between this being both my first experience with such a crisis and my student’s silent, but palpable sheer terror, I had far too much going on in the cockpit to think of it or to worry about the controller’s hurt feelings. Still, the alert Pan-pan is a declaration we pilots usually have only read about in some distant source.

My first approach brought us straight to Runway 34L, over the tall trees, but far too high, far too fast. We were not set up, so a go-around was my only option. Recall that I was having to pull hard on the throttle the entire approach. Climbing out again, I knew what I had to do. While I could have landed her successfully on my own, on downwind, I decided to put my student to work. I instructed Dave to pull firmly and hold the throttle as I had just done, “but don’t pull too hard,” I said,”you might break it off, then we will have problems!”

On my second approach, I extended my downwind, turning base skimming the tall forest canopy, then onto final even closer. Passing the last of the canopy, I shoved hard right rudder, hard left aileron, pitching the nose down-a textbook forward slip from my sweet days flying taildraggers. Still essentially under full power, we dropped like the proverbial rock. I recovered smoothly several feet above the sod farm, rocketed over the grass, hurtled across the creek, straight down the centerline of 34L, by this point about two feet off the deck. Thus established, I reached and pulled the mixture. The engine sputtered and died. The old girl floated some distance; I held her off, then she finally touched down gently on the mains, coasting across the hold short line at the next turnoff. I debated briefly with myself about the wisdom of starting the engine again for taxi, but now that I knew her symptoms, with my left hand ready at the mixture, I gave it a try. She lit without complaining and taxied us gently to parking.

Once back inside the busy school office, I grounded the old girl immediately, then captivated those in attendance with details of my recent aviation adventure. As the Skyhawk was towed into the hanger for inspection, one of my colleagues who had just walked in begged a private retelling of the story, what happened, where it happened, thoughts racing through my head, what I did to effect safe outcome of the flight. When I finished, he sat silent, studying me, clearly struggling to process the event from both his perspective and mine. He then said in measured, thoughtful, emphatic rhythm, “Wow! Good job! Lucky that didn’t happen to a student! Even a private pilot wouldn’t have known what to do! Most people wouldn’t have known what to do!”

The post-flight debrief provided little comfort or information that Dave could effectively use. He could not even process what had just happened, which is why he remained eerily silent after the flight. To him, Dave had just experienced his first emergency, and he was terrified in the aftermath. I have seen this before in pilots and since, in people in general. The fact that I remained calm and focused in the heat of battle, which is why I get paid the big bucks, may have gone a long way toward keeping Dave from abject panic. I was not worried, but he clearly was. The fact is, he had already checked out in both his mind and his heart. It is worth noting at this juncture that after he paid his bill to date, I never saw Dave again. This outcome was no surprise to me as I am fairly adept at spotting this phenomenon. I realized from the outset that Dave not only was not pilot material, but that he never would have finished his training, and it was this near-death experience that finally convinced him of the same.

We pilots cannot train for every eventuality. It is not possible. Sometimes the cosmos throws at us a circumstance so unexpected, so left field, that we have to improvise. The Apollo 13 near-catastrophe of almost sixty years ago springs to mind here as an example, but at least those guys were seasoned pilots who had access to the determined assistance of half of the PhDs on the planet. Chuck Yeager, and probably many others both before him and since, said that “[pilots] cannot be proficient in five different airplanes.” Each category, each class has within it many members each with its own idiosyncrasies. The flight instructor is unique in that he is expected to understand enough about aerodynamics, aircraft performance in general, the feel, what the aircraft is telling him, that he can fly and teach in many diverse aircraft. An emergency in one of those aircraft draws even more acutely upon that skill. Still, whether instructor or private pilot, when an emergency does occur in an aircraft, even one in which we are familiar, we may need to improvise, and improvisation requires both skill and experience.

Not everyone has what it takes to become a pilot nor should he try. While we cannot train for every eventuality, we need to expect that something can happen. If it can happen, it will happen. If it does happen, am I not just current, but are my skills honed through honest practice to be automatic? Is my training thorough, my knowledge accessible? Do I understand the systems, aerodynamics well enough to maintain the calm necessary to think the problem through and, if called upon, to improvise? What happened to Dave and me that day in the brilliant blue skies high over Culpepper may be a one-off. It may never have happened before in the history of aviation or perhaps it has. Either way, the event is so rare, so inconceivable, actually, so as not to demand further scrutiny.

While I am not attaching blame here or suggesting errant thinking, and I certainly am not encouraging we continue to fly corroded, oil-burning, short-circuiting, leaky, bird-nest-filled, mouse-ridden old rattletraps; piston rings and oil pumps, bearings and cylinders on borrowed time; venerable aluminum kites that should have been hauled to the bone yard years ago, ATP’s acquisition of a new Skyhawk started me thinking about learning, about expectations, about perspective. Imagine climbing into a fresh, reliable Cessna 172, completing a flawless flight in sumptuous leather comfort and appointments, engine, radios, other components actually working as designed, then landing and taxing to parking. With their freshly-minted certificates in hand, will these new pilots ever again fly another airplane so flawless? If the airplane never breaks or has trouble, will these pilots genuinely be prepared for a crisis? I honestly am not sure what the alternative is, but the pilot flying these fresh, gleaming birds earns his certificate, on some tangible level, with a certain false sense of security.